Chapter 17

Early in the morning, I got a ‘high priority call’ from Red.

[Lexi? Is this a good time?]

Yes, Red. I was sleeping as you know, but if it’s important, I can sleep later. I have several hours with nothing to do except shop and ride in an airplane.

[The money transfer from Cali, Columbia to Geneva, Switzerland just went through. I siphoned off $10,000 as we previously discussed, and directed it to your brokerage account in Zurich. What do you want to do with it?]

Get me the Wall St. Journal for next Monday. Today was Friday, so the next business day was Monday. He did better than that, he got me the tick-by-tick of all the trades through the day. In every market, in everything that was traded.

Red! This is impossible. There are thousands of stocks and just as many commodities and different contract months. I can’t sort through them all. Help!

[No problem at all, Lexi. It won’t take a second to sort them. How do you want me to present them to you?]

Umm ... We have to get the ten grand back to Cali by tomorrow, yes?

[End of day, today would be better. Not end of business day; sooner is better than later.]

Then ... sort through the prices by biggest percent change, and limit it to something that will give me at least a few thousand dollars at the end.

It appeared in memory in an instant, and I started with the commodity pages. According to the books and articles Red had sent me, commodities were likely to make the most cash immediately. Coffee futures looked good. It varied $0.05 from opening to close and it bounced around a lot: it went from $2.6500 per pound to $2.6205 then back up to $2.6430 then back down to close at $2.6000. Each penny or change yielded $375 per contract (37,500 pounds of coffee), so if I sold at ... never mind. It netted me almost $4700. Not a bad day’s work considering it was no work at all. $4700 per contract.

Red? How many contracts can we control?

[Theoretically 2.15 contracts given our cash available. But they do not deal in fractional contracts. So that would be exactly 2.0 contracts.]

Just two? Oh well. We won’t have to go through this again. Once we get the $9400 we can start with longer term projects.

[The Swiss broker will charge commissions on every buy and sell you enter. You can forget about $1000 or more of your profits.]

That’s highway robbery! How can they get away with charging so much?

[Lexi, you are an unknown person to them. Even your name is just a company registered in the Cayman Islands. And you are trading a very volatile item. The entire risk of loss would fall on them if you are a phony. Plus they have to make a profit on you, plus the risk they undertake, plus ... it’s not they that are committing highway robbery. Furthermore, figure in one factor: this isn’t exactly legal.]

Okay, okay. I won’t complain ... too much. Red, do it. Or do you need me to comment on each trade as we go along?

[No, I can easily do it. I have not traded in this market before – indeed I have not traded in ANY market. But it should be a simple matter.]

All this financial talk took about five minutes. Red was a super-fast computer, and he was dumping stuff into my brain which – considering that I didn’t have to do anything but think – was operating at the speed of a synapse. I couldn’t go back to sleep. Red was using stolen money to dabble in commodities markets that we knew nothing about. The fact that it was extremely unlikely that we’d get caught made little difference.

I got up and did my bathroom routine and was ready to go. I kept pestering Red for an update and about 7:45 he told me he’d finished the first leg of our complicated trading plan. But I was ‘out of it’ for about ten minutes. I just stood in Wild Mustang’s front yard, doing nothing, staring off into space for a significant time.

I finally snapped out of my trance, and Wolf, Flower and Wild Mustang were just sitting in the rockers on his front porch, watching me do absolutely nothing. “Sorry,” I said. “I just...”

“Quite all right,” Wolf broke in. “We all understand ... Ready to go now?”

“Umm ... yeah. Sure. Ready to go.”

He shot Mustang and Flower a look and then got out of his chair. We loaded up the borrowed Blazer, all done up in a crazy pattern of colors, and we left.

We went shopping at the superstore near the Navajo airport. I got two pair of fancy jeans, with a beaded stripe down the outside of each leg, and a couple of blouses with the matching pattern on them. The leather jacket with fleece lining was a smaller version of the expensive one that Wolf wore. I changed in the store and wore the ‘fancy’ stuff on the plane. We left by about 10:20. I felt a little bad about spending Wolf’s money, but he didn’t seem to mind.

Our flight to Riverton Regional Airport was listed at just over 530 miles. Flower briefed me on the fight up to Wyoming. She said she wanted to give a wide berth to Denver to the east and then come in to the area after bypassing Cheyenne, Wyoming. That would add another hundred miles to the trip. She warned me that there was scheduled commercial traffic at Riverton. She didn’t have a flight schedule, but Frontier Airlines regularly flew in/out of Riverton once per day. We’d have to keep an eye out for them and any other traffic into or out of Riverton. There was no tower, or radar control for that little airport.

We’d have to circle around to land from the northwest to the southeast. That should give us plenty of time to identify a hypothetical Frontier flight – or anybody else. Hopefully. I didn’t want to take a chance of any mid-air collisions.

Wolf clicked into our headsets from the passenger area. “We’re all set. Chief Bent Nose will be glad to have us come to his tipi anytime in the afternoon.” There was a pause. “White Owl, don’t be concerned, it’s just his word for his home. Flower has been there: it has indoor plumbing and everything.” He laughed and I heard the click of his connection being broken.

My head was on a swivel in the approach to Riverton, but I didn’t see any other planes, and there was nothing on the radio. We landed at Riverton Regional and called the car rental place that had a connection at the terminal. The bored woman at the Frontier Airlines counter put aside her magazine and said there was a Holiday Inn nearby. We got the car and passed on the Holiday Inn.

“Now what?” I asked Wolf.

“Now we go to the house of Bent Nose. Fort Wakashie is the location of the tipi of the Chief. We’ll find a place to stay once we’re there.”

It was a cold spring afternoon: mid-50s. Wolf was right. Wyoming was colder than Arizona. Was he always right?

Fort Wakashie was on the main road out of Riverton heading west ... sorta. So, the first leg of our journey was to head south to State Route 137, then go to 17 Mile Road, then we took the Blue Sky Highway. We went in the opposite direction from the Ethete Powwow Grounds, (according to the signs) which I wanted to see. And we finally caught up with US 287, just north of the Wind River Wild Horse Reserve, which I REALLY wanted to see, but we went to the northwest instead. We finally got to Fort Wakashie, with a noticeable sign leading to the Sacajawea Gravesite.

Off to the west was an amazing vista of snow-capped mountains. Wolf assured me that these were only the foothills to the real Rocky Mountains, that were only dim, gray shapes in the distance. We drove over the Wind River several times, sometimes on single-lane, rickety bridges. The Wind River was a roaring, wild, tumultuous waterway, just barely contained within its banks. I guess the snow was melting upstream as spring approached.

A gravesite didn’t hold much interest to me, except that Sacajawea might have been my great, great, etc, grand cousin. She was the Shoshone woman who led Lewis and Clark over the mountains to ‘discover’ the Pacific. That was about the thousandth time the Pacific was discovered by white men. So put an exclamation mark after their ‘discovery,’ I guess.

Two rights off the highway and three lefts and we got to an unmarked and nice wood home with a large mailbox in front. It had – what else? – a partially rusted pickup in the driveway, and two scooters alongside. We stopped the Chrysler New Yorker we’d rented along the edge of the road, did a dismount (for which I got a 9 from the East German judge, having gotten out without hurting myself), and knocked on the door. A young boy opened the door and said, “Hello.” He was younger than me. His (probable) mother was looking in from a doorway behind him.